Do you know what goes on behind the scenes in the IT groups at your bank? How about your favorite airline? Do you know how your taxes are calculated?

We do. SmartBear customers come from all sorts of places. Everyone’s got different requirements, skills, and environments; meeting these challenges is an exciting challenge for us.

As the leader in software quality tools, SmartBear builds technologies like Ready! API and Swagger to meet the varying needs, from startup to enterprise, with tools that reach end-to-end across the software delivery lifecycle.

What is “enterprise software” anyway?

To us, it means creating tools that aren’t just for individuals, but that bridge skill gaps and help groups collaborate cross-team within organizations, large or small. It also means that our tools must cater to varying levels of skill and expertise, specifically so that people can work together faster.

Many larger organizations require compliance with security and auditing practices. And of course, our tools have to be supported by experts, folks who work with innovators and implementers every day to make sure they’re successful with our software.

We are fortunate to see this happen first-hand with our customers in financial, medical, government, transportation, retail, online commerce, and lots of other industries where APIs have become essential to business.

What’s so “enterprise” about Ready! API 1.6?

On top of the decade of experience poured into our API tools already, we’ve released Ready! API 1.6 to include support for a number of challenges that enterprise developers and QA engineers face today, namely:

1. Working with lots of test artifacts (I mean, like, thousands and thousands)

Example filters to conditionally execute tests based on input parameters

4. Faster, cheaper distributed load testing with containers

Docker image for LoadUI NG agents

5. Extended HTTP security considerations (custom certificates)

Custom keystores / certificates in REST calls

Using custom certificate for virtual API sandboxes

6. Logging and reporting

Verbose logging of virtual API traffic

Improved load test reporting

Many of these improvements come directly from customer feedback, and since we have thousands of enterprises using Ready! API, there’s always plenty of feedback we’re grateful to incorporate into new releases. While the detailed list of what’s new is available here, this article will focus on just a few of the noteworthy items in this release.

Working with Lots of Test Artifacts?

For users with lots of APIs and test cases, it’s often necessary for them to be organized so that you can easily find the items you are looking for. With Ready! API 1.6, you can reorder the APIs in your project so that they appear however you like them to.

Working with Lots of Data?

A critical part of comprehensive API testing is to use realistic data that represents production traffic. This is where Ready! API leaves other testing approaches in the dust. You can import massive data sets for use as input parameters as well as data to validate responses from your APIs. Each permutation should represent unique conditions, one row of data at a time, and automating your tests to use this data saves you valuable time.

In Ready! API 1.6 we’ve optimized how data is imported, making it easy to automatically update column schemas based on files you use to manage your test data. We’ve also made it faster to load large project file, for those organizations who share big test suites between teams.

Conditional test case execution

Consider the situation that you’re tracking user stories and issues in JIRA. Upon feature completion, you want to run all tests that correspond to that new functionality. Maybe you have a few mainstay functional areas spread across your APIs, like a login or checkout process. You want to run just the tests that pertain to your code changes. That’s where test case tagging comes in.

Tagging your test cases with an identifier like ‘JIRA-1234’ or ‘login_process’ lets you filter down and execute to only those test cases that contain the tags you’re interested in. Tags come in handy, not only in the graphical interface, but in continuous integration (CI) motions when you need to run a subset of tests automatically based on an event defined elsewhere, like a code branch commit to a specific repository or because of a specific user story.

Here’s an example of conditionally running tests based on a set of tag identifiers defined in the parameters of a CI command:

Faster, cheaper distributed load testing with containers

Like many large organizations, containers are a revelation in how to standardize deployment across functional groups and environments. Docker containers are also incredibly lightweight compared to even a virtual machine, so no wonder people are looking to use them in load testing!

LoadUI NG Pro customers can now use our handy Remote Agent Docker image to rapidly spin up load generators from anywhere in the world at any time.

Extended HTTP security considerations

For those of you who have had to deal with custom SSL certificates, issued through a non-standard root CA or with additional client requirements attached, you know that as painful as they are to configure, there’s a reason behind their added complexity.

In SoapUI NG Pro, you can now configure REST calls with custom keystores so that people with enterprise security requirements have a way to integrate their certificates into testing activities.

Likewise, for VirtServer we’ve added the ability to install your own custom SSL certificates so that traffic to and from your virtual APIs is secured to the requirements of your organization.

Logging and Reporting

We’ve also included the ability in VirtServer to turn on verbose transaction logging on virtual API sandboxes so that you can diagnose integration issues, either with internal team members or external partners using your virtual API deployed on VirtServer.

We also now support floating VirtServer licenses, so that you can integrate your virtual API sandboxes into continuous integration environments where the specific VirtServer instance(s) are created and destroyed dynamically.

Finally, we’ve redesigned the load testing reports available from LoadUI NG Pro, making them cleaner and more useful by members of your performance and operations teams. We’ve also added a few additional metrics to what is available in charts and graphs, small but powerful updates for people who know that performance is paramount to successful APIs.

Check it out for yourself!

If you haven’t already, download a trial to try the latest in enterprise API testing! For existing customers, you can get the update by selecting the Help menu and ‘Check for Updates’ item in Ready! API.